Untitled

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is in the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is an awareness of perfection. All art work is about beauty; all positive work represents it and celebrates it.
—Agnes Martin

Distinguished by its alternating bands of delicate and refined color, Untitled (2001) represents the pinnacle of Agnes Martin’s long and distinguished career. Painted three years before her death in 2004, this painting belongs to the artist’s final cycle of work, which she executed in her beloved Taos, New Mexico. Evoking the natural splendor of the desert, the wide bands suggest the vastness of her adopted home. Radiating with light, Untitled is a sequence of enticing wide horizontal bands of airy color that fuse together to establish a cohesive and open aura of light, space and calm.
Through her subtle interplay of color and line, paintings such as Untitled aim to enthrall the viewer in a meditative trance that evokes stillness, equilibrium and the feeling of being in nature. Yet, Martin was clear that her paintings were not about landscapes: “A lot of people say that my work is like landscape. But the truth is that it isn’t because there are no straight lines in nature. My work is non-objective, like that of the abstract expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at a landscape so I never protest when they say my work is like a landscape. But it’s really about a feeling of beauty and freedom, that you experience in a landscape” (A. Martin, quoted in “Agnes Martin, Interviewed by Irving Sandler”, Art Monthly, no. 169, September 1993).
Bands of pale yellow and light sky blue alternate in a horizontal dance across the width of the canvas. The delicacy and precision with which Martin has delineated these subtle washes of color create an atmospheric effect, making the colors hover above the surface of the canvas as if a gentle mist, perceptible, yet out of reach even while floating in front of our very eyes. Thus, the way Martin used color in these later paintings becomes part of the composition, rather than merely an expressive device used to represent what the artist depicts within it. Martin’s paintings from this period fit squarely into an illustrious body of work by artists sought for their abstract sublime through non-representational means.
Martin’s carefully crafted interplay between line and color achieves a synthesis of opposing poles in an aesthetic debate that has been waged between colorito and disegno since the Italian Renaissance. Similarly, Martin stakes out new terrain in the space between drawing and painting by using both acrylic pigments and graphite directly upon the canvas. More so, the rigidity of the grid and its mechanical order are counterbalanced by the delicacy of the artist’s hand and her tactile approach to applying color. Because of her ability to balance each of these dual concerns, Martin is often seen as the inheritor of both Abstract Expressionism’s expressive color and evocation of the spiritual, as well as a progenitor of Minimalism’s cool sense of color, technical rigor and reduced forms.
Born in Canada, Martin was raised in Vancouver, BC and moved to the United States in 1932. After studying at Columbia University in the 1940s she moved to a block of artists’ lofts in Lower Manhattan where she became neighbors with artists like Ellsworth Kelly and James Rosenquist in the 1950s. Despite the alliance the Minimalists felt with Martin, it was the Abstract Expressionists, like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, with whom Martin felt a true kinship. The grid became Martin’s way of approaching the non-hierarchical all-over, instead of center-focused painting, and a matrix for approaching the spiritual and transcendent in painting. As part of this artistic milieu, she came into contact with many members of the New York City avant-garde who were pushing for new ideas and methods. As her career developed into the late 1970s and 1980s, Martin acknowledged her constant investigation of a seemingly straightforward scheme, noting, “My formats are square, but the grids are never absolutely square, they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power” (A. Martin, quoted in D. Schwartz, Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, p. 29). Breaking down the primacy of the square canvas, Martin pushed toward the heart of the painting. Like her Abstract Expressionist compatriots Rothko and Newman, she believed not so much in the formalist concerns of the artist, but instead in the painter’s ability to evoke feeling and emotion in the viewer through a more intimate and reverential approach to abstraction.
Untitled is a prime example of Martin’s exploration of the sublime and the triumphal final chapter of her storied career. Ned Rifkin describes the sublime effect of her late paintings in the catalogue of the artist’s last major exhibition at the Menil Collection: “For more than five decades, Martin has created paintings that are evocations of light, each an individual issuance of ethereal rhythms. Simultaneously powerful and gentle, they are spartan works, beautiful without the slightest adornment. The paintings that Martin has offered us with the unstinting consistency are pictures of anything. They are cadences of light, form, and color. You can ‘hear’ them with your eyes. They are silent sounds” (N. Rifkin, Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond, exh. cat., Houston, Menil Collection, 2002, p. 28). Nearly two decades after her death, her work remains widely sought after and held in prominent collections worldwide. Martin’s later works are among her most powerful invocations of the sublime, and the present lot speaks clearly as one such persuasive expression of pure joy.